Thad White speaking at the April MoMo.

Director, Product Management, Yahoo! Mobile

Yahoo things about three groups - communications, information, entertainment.

communication - IM, mail, photos

information - search, wap for news, sports, weather, and alerts

entertainment - downloadable brew games, ringtones from launch

Distribution is a big issue, yahoo has a great relationship with carriers.

Opportunity - Yahoo heard that users wanted to take their information with them on mobile phones. So they launced send to phone.

Simple form sends basic info like phone number and cross street info. If you go past the limits of SMS (160 chars), for instance driving directions, it sends a text message with a link to a WAP page.

Challenges -

reach vs. quality of user interface (they wanted to maximize reach so they went with SMS and WAP).

Abuse protection, but didn’t want there to be a high barrier to use. So they limited on the send and receive side. Number of messages that can to to a single device.

Price sensitivity. Can’t send a whole lot of messages.

Verizon WAP integration. Verizon doesn’t extract the URL.

Results -

Significant adoption among PC audience. A direct call to action resulted in a 10x increase in click through.

Great user feedback and press.

Interest internally among more Yahoo properties to launch “send to phone”

Next steps -

Extend to more properties.

Extend to MMS and other delivery mechanisms.